First post, by jheronimus
- Rank
- Oldbie
Hi, all!
Got myself a SuperMicro P6SBA motherboard. It's a 440BX Slot 1 board with 3 ISA slots, so really neat for my needs. However, it comes with AMI WinBIOS that seems to give me quite a few issues.
1) weird setup menu resolution
My machine came with a 3DLabs Permedia 2 graphics card. Whenever I try to enter the setup menu, the screen turns black and displays this:
I suppose, the graphics card doesn't support the graphic mode WinBIOS uses? If I swap the card for a Riva TNT2 it's all fine. Is there anything I can do to fix this? Permedia 2 is the card that was used with this system, so I don't suppose the previous owner never used BIOS menu. There must be a way to make it work.
2) the system doesn't like ISA
Here's my current setup
P3 500 MHz
256MB RAM
Riva TNT2 16MB
Voodoo 2 (soon to be SLI)
3COM network card
SoundBlaster 16 CT2230 connected to a Roland SC-55
MusicQuest clone MPU controller connected to a Roland MT-32
It really seems like the system has issues with ISA. It took me a while to simply make the SB16 appear in Windows and even then it appeared as one device ("SB16 or AWE32") while it supposed to be three: SB16, MPU401 controller (the one in the soundblaster, not my other card) and gameport joystick. I'm using the drivers from Creative's website. I had to reassign all IRQs in BIOS menu to "ISA/EISA".
After I've added the MPU controller, it all started to act even weirder. More often than not games like Doom would not give me any sound if I pick General MIDI and would slow down to a crawl. The MT-32 works fine. The cards seem to conflict somehow even though I've set SB16 to 300 and the MPU card to 330.
The motherboard BIOS has been updated to the latest 3.1 version, I've also installed Intel's chipset drivers.
Feels like there's some weird BIOS default setting that I need to change, yet the manual doesn't mention anything apart from IRQs. What am I missing?